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A few days after the events of Kristallnacht, the night of the 9 and 10 November 1938, the kindertransport rescue of children from Nazi-controlled Europe began. Within a few months, over 9,000 children, mostly Jewish or of Jewish origin, arrived by train and ship to Britain. Following parliamentary approval of these transports, local committees were set up throughout the country, their aim was to provide homes for the refugee children. Cambridge was one of the most active of these local committees. It was created by Greta Burkill with Eva Hartree, Sybil Hutton and others. In a few months, up to 100 children came into the care of the committee. The committee was a branch of the Cambridge Refugee Committee and was answerable to the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) and Central British Fund for Germany Jewry both based in London.

These arrivals stopped on the outbreak of war in September 1939 but the work of the committee continued up to 1947.

The subject of Greta Burkill and the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee was the centre of a project funded by The Heritage Lottery Fund in 2013-2014. A research team was formed by Keystage Arts and Heritage. They began to uncover hitherto unpublished stories of the work of the committee. Initial research was done drawing on the Burkill Papers lodged with the University of Cambridge Library. Research was also facilitated by members of the Association for Jewish Refugees (AJR) and several former kindertransport veterans were interviewed along with local families who had offered homes to the children.

=Greta Burkill= Greta Burkill was the daughter of an economist father who was also the publisher of a left-wing German newspaper. She was of mixed Russian and Austrian stock and had Jewish ancestry.

In late 1938, Greta formed a local welfare committee, the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee (CCRC) with Eva Hartree, Sybil Hutton, Hilda Sturge, Margaret Braithwaite and others.

Those who remember her, recall a rather small lady (around 5 foot high) with a huge amount of energy, a ready smile for refugee children, a stubborn streak that meant she didn’t take ‘no’ for answer and a hugely caring disposition.

Greta Burkill’s involvement with the CRCC was pivotal. Around 70 ‘guaranteed’ refugee children came to Cambridge in the first months of 1939. She took on the key role of ensuring the children in their care got the best schooling, good training places and helping older ones into occupations such as teaching and nursing. When war broke out in 1939, hundreds more refugee children were evacuated to East Anglia.

Greta Burkill died in 1984.

=The Committee= Volunteer committees were set up throughout the country under the auspices of the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM) in London. One of the most active was the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee (CCRC) set up by Greta Burkill and others. The committee fulfilled many of the functions that social services do today. These volunteers had to look after the welfare of the children in their charge. This meant finding suitable homes for children, ensuring that they were happy with their foster families and looking after their health and educational needs. The committee members regularly visited families to make sure that the children were properly cared for, were going to school and were having Jewish education if this was required. They had to find new guarantors if the existing ones backed out, which they often did. They also had to find funds for school fees, healthcare, uniforms and pocket money. They tried to help contact children’s parents or near relatives, but in most cases the children had already lost their families to the Holocaust.

In the eight months up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, nearly 10,000 children were brought out of continental Europe to find safety in Britain. The Kindertransports were brought to a halt on 1 September 1939. That day 250 children were waiting on a train in Prague ready to bring them to London. With war looming, borders were closed and the train never left. Most, if not all, perished in the Holocaust.

Members of the Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee included:

Margaret Mary Braithwaite
Born in 1910, Margaret was a Quacker and founding member of the CCRC. A Newham graduate, she was a pioneer in the field of Computational Linguistics and later co-founded Lucy Cavendish College.

Eva Hartree
One of the country’s first women councillors, Eva became Mayor of Cambridge in 1924 (standing as an independent). As one of the most active Committee members, she welcomed refugee children to her home in Bentley Road.

Sybil Hutton
Sybil was a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights. Apart from her active work on the CCRC, she fostered refugee children offering them a home at 1, Chaucer Road. During the war she became an air raid warden in Trumpington.

Kathleen Wood-Legh
Kathleen was born in 1901 in Canada. Blind from birth, she became a lecturer in Medieval History at Cambridge. She was an active member of the CCRC and the 55 Club Committee.

Hilda Sturge
Hilda put her strong Quaker views into action to support the refugee children. She was active in setting up the CCRC and sat on the 55 Club Committee.

Joseph B. Skemp
Joseph was a Greek scholar and Fellow at Gonville and Calus College from 1936-47. He was an active member of the 55 Club Committee and Secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning which aided refugee academics in Britain.

Malli Meyer
Malli came as a Jewish refugee to Britain in 1933 and settled in Barton Close in Cambridge. During the war she offered her services to the CCRC as a professional dentist, treating the children usually without charge.

According to her son John, Malli helped others escape Germany by finding sponsors; she was helped in this work by Greta Burkill and Sybil Hutton. In 1939 Malli’s brother Julius came to visit. Malli begged him to stay, but he returned to his wife and children in Germany. Tragically they all perished.

=Educating the Refugees=

Many refugee children had been excluded from their state schools in Germany and Austria simply for being Jewish. The Cambridge Children’s Refugee Committee’s job to find good local schools for the children in its care. Some children went to the County Boys (on Hills Road) and County Girls (on Long Road), others to the Cambridge Technical School (East Road) and many were offered places at private schools such as the Leys and Perse.

Many local schools offered places (often free) to the refugee children who came to Cambridge. Among these support was given by both the Perse Boys and Perse Girls schools. Schools sometimes offered free places. For many pupils, the committee raised monies for school fees as well as finding grants for uniforms and other essentials.

German-born Eva Rhoden was admitted to the Perse Girls in January 1939. Presumably speaking little English, she nevertheless won a form prize by the following December. By 1942, she had secured a place at Newnham College with a Trinity Exhibition. She was one of several girls supported and encouraged by Maisie Cattley, the popular and charismatic headmistress of the Perse Girls. Research from Perse Girls archives has revealed that many Jewish refugee children entered Miss Cattley’s school just before and during the war.

The committee helped place some of the refugees at ‘Hillel House’, the Perse School’s Jewish boarding house on Glebe Road. This was run by Mr and Mrs Dagut. Harry Dagut was housemaster and teacher of English at Perse Boys. Mrs Dagut acted as housekeeper and played an active role supporting Mrs Burkill’s committee. Boys would live at Hillel House and then be lodged with local families during the holidays. Perse Girls pupils lived with foster families mostly set up by Mrs Burkill’s committee. Susanne Ostberg, for example, lived with Alderman H Ambrose and family at 27, Rustat Road, Ilse Loewenstein stayed with Professor and Mrs Hutton at 1, Chaucer Road. For Mrs Burkill, “Education was the most important thing” and there is no doubt that these refugee children were given every opportunity to renew their lives in Cambridge.

Gretal Jordan
Gretel was born in Hamburg in 1921 to a well-off merchant family. She was not sure quite how she ended up on the Kindertransport, just that ‘the committee’ in Hamburg organised it. Her father was murdered in 1940 and her mother and grandparents perished in Auschwitz, her younger brother in Buchenwald.

In 1939 Dr (Later Sir) Alan Drury was in Cambridge working for the Medical Research Centre. One of his colleagues was a cousin of Gretel. She persuaded the Drurys to sponsor the girl Gretel came on the Kindertransport on 6 July 1939. Sir Alan met her at Cambridge station and took her to his home in Millington Road, Newnham.

Gretel helped Daphne (Mrs Drury) keep house and look after three evacuees from London and also assisted Daphne in learning to lip read (as she was totally deaf).

In 1940 Sir Alan was asked to go to Northwood with his work for the MRC: he was instrumental in setting up the Blood Transfusion service.

Gretel had to have permission to be allowed to go to Northwood, and Sir Alan helped her sort this out. He also attended the tribunal with the police when internment was being considered. She avoided internment, but was not permitted to join the family visiting Daphens’ mother in Norfolk, as it was too close to the coast.

Gretel started training as a nurse. She said that she had no thought of nursing when she was in Germany, but presumably had to rethink career options when she came to Britain. She trained in Hillingdon Hospital, and later as a midwife. She went on to have a successful nursing career in various hospitals, including as a matron on Kent.

Siegmar Koppold
Siegmar was born on 12 October 1936 in Leipzig. He arrived in England in September 1939. He and his sister Zilla (born 30 January 1939) were among the youngest of all the 10,000 Kindertransport children. His brother Harold also came to Cambridge and lived in Orchard Street with a Jewish family, Mir and Mrs Sofier and their son Norman. His cousins Paula and Edith came to Cambridge too and were eventually housed in the Committee’s hostel at 25, Parkside.

Siegmar was very young when he left home and has no recollection of the departure from Germany or arrival in England. Initially he stayed with an upper-class family, Jack and Peggy Longland in Welwyn Garden City. He later came to a more modest house in Cambridge at 60, Eden Street, the home of Elsie Mansfield. She lived there with her brother Len, who was a butler at one of the Cambridge colleges, and their 15-year-old niece Gladys. He attended the Cambridge High School for Boys (now Hills Road Sixth Form College). Siegmar had an excellent education in Cambridge which set up well for when, in 1948, he left for America where he was adopted by a relative, Meyer Silber. His sister had already gone ahead of him to America, and his brother to a new life in Israel.

As food rationing was very severe, Siegmar did suffer from some malnutrition, losing two molars as a result of it. He sees this as a minor loss, though. Siegmar remains to this day very grateful to the CCRC for their efficient management of the refugee children and to the British for the Kindertransport and his good education. Like many other Jewish refugees, Siegmar never saw his parents again.

Michael Steinberg
St Louis, USA, was the ultimate choice of destination for Carmi and his Mother as relatives had lived there since the 1860s and this is where the elder son now was living. The first step, while waiting for their American quota numbers to come up, was to come to England. For Carmi this was realised through the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who made it their business to try to save some children.

Peter and Elizabeth Layng, living in Stapleford, Cambridge, offered to take one German Jewish child and the Quakers matched them up with Carmi who was to become known as Michael.

Peter Layng was a teacher of Latin and Greek in a secondary school in Cambridge. The Layngs described themselves as liberal in their political views and agnostic in their religous views. They had 2 children, Judith and Jenny (now Jenny Cox), and an adopted son, Tony, a distant cousin. Judith and Tony were about the same age as Michael and Jenny 2 years younger.

In an interview, with Jenny Cox, her recollections were that they were, as children very happy and treated Michael very much as a member of the family and as a brother. However, it was clear that they only met up in holiday times as the Layng children and Tony boarded at the Friends school in Saffron Walden and Michael was in the Jewish Boarding House at the Perse.

Jenny Cox wrote recalling the war years and Michael’s time with the family, that her mother had corresponded with Mrs Steinberg before Carmi’s arrival and she, Judy and Tony liked the idea of helping  a Jewish boy and looked forward to the prospect of  enlarging the family. She recalled that her parents were much more aware of what was going on in Germany than many professionals and were a very public spirited couple. Both from their Quaker upbringing and conversations at home they were aware of the injustices dealt out to Jews by Germany.

Mrs Steinberg, on her escape from Germany, lived in Cambridge with other refugees. Jenny writes that when the time came for Mrs Steinberg and Michael to go to the USA he was more than ready and eager to go. She felt saddened by this and their paths diverted although they did correspond for a while.

Michael Steinberg went on to become a world renowned music critic.

Marianne
Marianne was born in Germany in 1931. Her parents, though of Jewish origin, were brought up as Lutheran Christians. She didn’t know what it meant to be Jewish until Hitler’s policies became clear. In 1938 she was thrown out of her school in Germany and her parents realised the danger of staying under the Nazis, putting her and her sister on the Kindertransport. “I remember this big house in Caldecote – very cold… They tried to make us feel at home as much as they could. I used to clean out the rabbit hutch, which I didn’t like doing at all.”

Marianne stayed with her mother’s sister, Aunt Kaethe Brieger, and Uncle Ernst in the Old Recory in Caldecote. Ernst had come to England as a refugee academic in 1935. They had three children of their own but took in Marianne, who was quickly enrolled in the Llandaff Church School in Cambridge. In 1940 Marianne’s father and mother came to collect their children, only to find that their adopted country, Holland, had been invaded by the Germans. They were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in the infamous camp on the Isle of Man.

Marianne’s memories of the Old Rectory are of a very cold house without electricity and a large garden with a goat and a smelly rabbit hutch. Marianne was a confident and athletic child who quickly made friends with her only neighbours, boys from a farming family, the Clerks. After Llandaff, Marianne and Ray briefly joined their parents at the internment camp. The idea was that families would be sent to Australia, but the plan was dropped after one of the first ships was torpedoed en route.

Hoping to improve her education, Marianne’s parents sent her back to Cambridge, where they enrolled her at the Perse Girls. Marianne fondly remembers the headmistress, Miss Cattley: “She helped so many of us refugees”. Marianne played on the school netball and cricket teams and was invited to lots of birthday parties but, she says, always felt line an outsider.

Marianne spent the rest of the war years living as a boarder at the Perse and at the Old Rectory in Caldecote. She would help her aunt take their fruit and vegetables to sell on Cambridge market. After the Perse, Marianne won a place at Girton College, where she read Natural Sciences. Later she became a researcher and teacher and moved to America, doing graduate work in Freshwater Biology at Michigan University, where she met her husband.